Technical Field of Endeavor
Present invention embodiments are generally directed to the field of computing and more specifically to the field of information processing, and even more specifically, to the field of high-demand, high-performance, and supercomputing.
Description of the Related Art
Attempts to create optimal solutions to solve specific and complex information processing tasks have focused on creating hardware architectures designed to exploit various features of the information to be processed so that such processing can be performed in an optimal manner. Hardware devices containing specialized vector processing units are one such example. Computing hardware containing multiple dedicated parallel processors are another example. Software written for such hardware formats the information into a form that takes advantage of the hardware's specialization, thus creating a computing environment that is tailored to the specific problem at hand. Such tailored solutions are usually implemented on high-end supercomputing hardware architectures with specialized software. Consequently, this approach is prohibitively expensive for most organizations, often costing millions of dollars. Additionally, once created, tailored solutions of this type are only suitable for a specific problem or class of problems.
The software written to solve specific high-performance computing problems is necessarily constrained by the features of the hardware upon which such software runs. When such software is in machine-readable form, it is tightly coupled to a specific architecture upon which it will run. Further, the underlying hardware machine architecture is almost always static, and only reconfigurable (and only partially so) in a few non-commercial machines not widely available. Even the so-called grid (or network or large-cluster) computing approaches, which rely on large numbers of interconnected physical or virtual machines, are still constrained by running on a few different types of conventional processors. While the topology of the network can be configurable in such approaches, the architecture of the underlying processors is static, and thus not tailored to the problem at hand.